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MSI 990FXA-GD80 Motherboard Review

MSI taken their personal brand of features and combined them with AMD’s latest chipset architecture to bring to the table the all-new 990FXA-GD80, that breathes a bit of new life into the AMD world. By Motherboards.org

AMD and Intel have long been rivals in both the CPU and chipset markets and this has resulted in price wars for the last decade as both companies vie for your hard earned cash. AMD has traditionally been the underdog in this game, but during their AMD64 heyday they made the top, if only for a moment. AMD in my eyes stands for those who want adequate performance, but not the price tags associated with many of Intel’s mainstream CPUs, and for general gaming the AMD CPUS do their part. That being said AMD also has nothing that can touch Intel’s high-end X58 chipsets or their concurring CPUS, but for those on a budget this is an irrelevant fact as those users cannot afford those high-end parts in any case. Most AMD buyers are on a budget and looking for the best performance versus dollars tradeoff for their systems, and AMD is glad to fill that role.

Gamers are the target audience AMD and with the acquisition of ATI, that target has become even more apparent. Fans of the ATI brand at first balked harshly at the takeover by AMD, but this proved to be the best move AMD has done yet as the ATI brand still lives under the new AMD moniker. The real drawbacks for fans of the AMD chipset were the fans that like NVIDIA cards better than AMD and want to run SLI and not CrossFire configurations in their systems. This is one of the new features that the 990FX chipset has that will make it more appealing to gamers, SLI support right out of the box. I know that is a big issue, but the really big question is where is Bulldozer right? Well the manufactures had some issues with the new CPUs and then decided to go ahead and launch the chipset without the CPU. The 990FX does support the latest CPUs, including Bulldozer, but it also still supports all the current AM3 CPUs that are floating around the market on its new AM3 Socket. Today we take a look at MSI’s flavor of motherboard the all-new 990FXA-GD80 the latest candidate to the AMD lineup in 2011.